Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Day 144 of triphasic sleeping, so nice to be back on schedule.

Back on schedule. As I wrote in my previous post, I had a little bit of trouble getting back on schedule. It turned out that I was a little under the weather. I am not sure what I was sick with, but it was some sort of mild flu-like malaise. I think that at this point in the experiment, I have to admit that the triphasic schedule does put some stress on my body - if my diet becomes sub-par, or I am a little run down with allergies, or have an injury, or stop exercising, or whatever, I start to become tired on this schedule. This seems to be the minimum sleep that I can get by on. When I am fit and healthy I have no problem maintaining this schedule, but if I am not at my peak, I seem to need to get a little extra sleep. The first method I try of adding in extra sleep is to make my evening nap a double cycle: ie, 180 minutes. Usually that seems to be enough, but if it is not, I sleep right through my night wake cycle, getting up at the usual time of 6:00 for my morning wake cycle. On day of that has been enough to get be back on track with only 2 exceptions since March - one exception was due to injury and one due to flu. On both occasions I slept throughout most of the day. Not including the days that I have slept in from injury or sickness, I have averaged 4.2 hrs a night. If I include the days that I have ended up "sleeping in", I have averaged 5.1 hrs of sleep per night since the end of March, when I started this. Before I did this experiment, I was averaging 8.2 hrs per night on average, so I have gained the equivalent of 28.25 days so far this year.

Triphasic sleeping is like having 
a discount time machine!


So, have I gotten an extra months worth of productive time? Certainly my projects have expanded to fill the extra time, and I really feel it when I go off schedule and only have 16 hrs in a day. I do a form of task tracking called "Getting things done (GTD)", and so I can compare what I have gotten done this year versus last year. Based on that, I would have to say that I probably gotten MORE than an extra months worth of work done. A substantial portion time has been used visiting my grandmother up in Dover-Foxcroft. I have been made 7 more trips up there than I did last year, and those take a full day. I have really appreciated having the time to do that. I have put surprising amount of time into this blog, which is sort of a wash since if I were not doing triphasic, I would not be doing this blog :). Other time has gone into my business start-up, leisure time, bread-making, and other little things. All in all, I really enjoy the quiet time to myself at night. No matter how crazy my days get, I get this little 4 hour time at night to catch up, or relax, or spend pursuing my personal projects.

3 comments:

  1. After having fallen into a triphasic sleep schedule myself, I came across your blog here, and it's really helped out!

    Of course, you've been doing this a good while longer than I, but I do hope my results end up as great as yours!

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  2. Are you doing a 90x3 or some other form of triphasic? How long have you been doing it, and for how long? Keep me posted, and feel free to ask me anything as well.

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  3. I've been going at it a month now, and yes, 90x3 currently. I started August first, and continuing to experiment with it since.

    The biggest problem I seem to have really is that I tend to oversleep now and then, and the occasional bout of insomnia. Lastly, when we have company, and they have me up past when I desire, skipping some of them occasionally.

    I was planning on rereading your entries to see how you dealt with these situations, should be something.

    Will do.

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